


Baby Shoes

by cnomad



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, F/M, Past Abortion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-27
Updated: 2013-08-27
Packaged: 2017-12-24 19:20:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 808
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/943700
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cnomad/pseuds/cnomad
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Some nights John tells Stiles he's working late, when really he's sitting next to Claudia's headstone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Baby Shoes

When John tells Stiles he’s working the night shift, most of the times, it’s the truth. But sometimes – on the rare occasion that things have been more stressful than usual and he’s a little more tired than normal and he just needs a moment to breathe – sometimes it’s a lie. And maybe it’s not nice of him to do, to lie to his one and only son, the boy he loves more than life itself. But there are times when John can’t forgive himself because all he can think is this: Stiles wasn’t supposed to be an only child. There wasn’t supposed to be just one and only for John, for Claudia. They were supposed to have three, four, five kids. When they got married it was a dream they shared in the late hours of their last night on their honeymoon.

“I want a big family,” she’d whispered, her delicate, thin fingers – so like Stiles’ – trailing down the side of his face.

He’d smiled and said, “Me too.” His voice was soft and muffled, his lips pressed against her knuckles.

“No,” she said. “A big one. Massive. Huge! I want a little von Trapp family – von Stilinski. That sounds good doesn’t it?”

“So long as we don’t name any of them Friedrich, I’m good with that plan.”

Claudia’s face had shone in the moonlight slipping through the hotel curtains. Her eyes were bright as she ducked forward to smother him with kisses, laughter bubbling out of her, “Not Friedrich. But I was thinking my father’s name?”

John had groaned, loud and over exaggerated, and thrown his arm around his wife’s – his wife’s! – shoulder. “Christ, Claudia, that might be even worse!”

“You ass!”

She’d shoved at him before he rolled them over, the two of them overjoyed with the path they were headed down.

On the nights he lies to Stiles – the nights he walks out the door in his uniform, waving goodbye to his son – he drives out to the cemetery and sits beside his wife’s – his  _wife’s_  – headstone, a pair of baby shoes gripped in his hands. John sits and he let’s himself remember the way her smile had widened when he’d figured out her elaborate riddle. Stiles was asleep under his Batman bed sheets and Claudia had been teasing him all day with riddles and clues, until finally he’d sat at the edge of their bed, one hand holding her waist while the other came up to rest on her still-flat stomach. She’d looked at him and she knew he’d figured it out and she laughed – that same bright, airy laugh that had made him fall in love with her all those years earlier.

They fell into bed giggling like children, imagining the little brother or sister Stiles was going to hold in just a few months time.

His cheeks were wet with the tears that had already begun to fall, his throat tightening around the choked sobs ripping from his chest. There was no baby brother for Stiles to babysit. No little sister to beg Stiles to play dress up with. There was only an oncology report, a series of detailed, heart wrenching tests that all said the same thing. There was no room for pre-natal vitamins in the middle of chemo radiations and drug cocktails. No time for baby showers when the mother was losing her hair in clumps. There were was no path leading towards a big family – only one narrow path that could possibly lead to a few extra months.

She had the procedure quietly and without any fuss. Nobody but John and the doctor’s knew about her condition. It was supposed to be a surprise on Stiles’ birthday but the surprise never came. Her belly was empty, her body being eaten up by cancer.

But not before he’d bought her a pair of baby shoes. They were small and white – simple, maybe a little plain, but the start of something new. The next step on their way to the promises they made each other the last night of their honeymoon.

“What do you think about Friedrich,” he’d asked, his cheek pressed up against her stomach even though there was nothing to hear or feel yet. Just the knowledge that their baby was slowly knitting itself together cell by cell. Claudia had held the baby shoes, dancing them up and down his back when she wasn’t threading her fingers through his hair.

“I think we’ve got a while to find a better name than that,” she’d hummed.

A year later there was no baby to welcome into the world. There was only John, walking through the white, endless halls of the hospital only to find Stiles broken and alone. There was only Claudia and a bed sheet covering her face.

There was only this: a pair of baby shoes, never worn.

**Author's Note:**

> Feel free to follow me at [my tumblr](http://cinematicnomad.tumblr.com/) where I often post drabbles and other fangirlish things.


End file.
